“The Racial Reverberations of 1917: The Communist Party of Brazil’s New Antiracism and the Contest for Black Support in the 1930s” by Jessica GrahamDuring its Third Period (roughly 1928 to 1935) Comintern adopted its most radical resolution on the “Negro Question” when it moved to promote black self-determination. Originally drafted in relation to the United States, the self-determination policy conceded that blacks were an “oppressed racial minority” and defended their right to form their own autonomous black soviet state. Contrary to conventional beliefs about Brazilian communism, the Comintern’s new antiracist stance became the Communist Party of Brazil’s (PCB) official position. Official communist antiracism in Brazil shook not only Leftist class theory but also the nationalist narrative that labeled Brazil a society free of racism. At the same time the Frente Negra Brasileira (Black Brazilian Front)—an unprecedented black social, political, and cultural movement—emerged with its own critiques of and mobilizations against racial prejudice. The fascist Ação Integralista Brasileira (Brazilian Integralist Action) party also coveted black constituents in the 1930s and advanced its unique racial philosophy. This paper analyzes the PCB’s competition for black support in this milieu and examines how blackness in Brazil was politicized in novel ways during the 1930s.

"Constructivist Tectonics and the Wegenerian Revolution" by Kristin RombergThis paper looks at the revolution in scientific and aesthetic thinking that coincided in a complex relationship with Bolshevik power and the Proletarian Culture movement in the first decade after the Russian Revolution. Drawn from a larger project on Russian constructivism, it focuses on the discipline of tectonics, a long-misunderstood aspect of the constructivist aesthetic program. The paper situates the term, and its occlusion, within a larger tectonic rebellion of the 1910s and 1920s that included Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift and Aleksandr Bogdanov’s proto-systems theory of tectology. Unlike the contemporaneous quantum revolution in physics, whose emphasis on probabilities and superposition states reinforced thinking in terms of chance processes and risk management, Wegener’s and Bogdanov’s theories emphasized global interconnectedness and tradeoffs. Similarly, constructivist tectonics cultivated an aesthetics of embeddedness and contingency.

"The Spread of the Soviet Myth in the West" by Marcello FloresMany years after the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have to go back to some crucial issues: what is the role of the October Revolution in history? What impact did you have in the West and the rest of the world? How could a system that promised freedom and equality identified with socialism an increasingly dictatorial and authoritarian regime?The imposition of Soviet Communism as the only winning model in the West has ended up replacing socialism and its revolutionary push with the U.S. defense dogma, with the idea that the revolution corresponds to the Jacobin conquest of power, with the need to Build a strong state that controls the economy. The fascination of communism in the West, despite continued expulsions and leaps by revolutionary minorities disillusioned by totalitarian drift, lasted for almost the entire duration of the USSR, replacing one after the other many "myths" October, that of the defense of the revolution, from that of industrialization to that of anti-fascism, from that of Stalingrad to that of the contest for the conquest of space.The paper will try to compare the construction and dissemination of these myths with the history of the USSR and socialism.